The Life of Haydn (review)

While the past decade or so has produced an impressive series of books related to Joseph Haydn's life and music, the longstanding lack of a concise biography, intended for a general readership, has not been remedied. Robbins Landon's five-volume Haydn: Chronicle and Works (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976–80) proved unable to fill such a gap because of its sheer size, and the boiled-down version Haydn: His Life and Music (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), with musical analyses added by David Wyn Jones, inevitably remained a compromise. (That said, it seems somewhat odd that the biographical blurb on the jacket of the present volume makes no mention of this coauthored work.) At the other extreme, James Webster's excellent overview in the first forty-some pages of The New Grove Haydn (London: Macmillan, 2002) will inevitably make interested readers want to learn more, and look precisely for the kind of detailed, but nonetheless easy-to-follow biography that The Life of Haydn finally presents.

Observing the obvious turning-points in Haydn's life and career, the narrative is organized in seven chapters. The first ("God and Country") treats the composer's childhood and youth, laying special emphasis on how the eight-year-old choirboy at St. Stephen's in Vienna became part of an "all-encompassing social, musical and religious system, without its equal in the rest of Europe" (p. 12). The second chapter ("Serving Princes") describes the first decade-and-a-half of his engagement with the Esterházy court, while the third ("Italian Opera at Eszterháza") goes on to explain how opera dominated the composer's life throughout the years 1776–90. At this point the chronological thread breaks up: the next forty pages (" 'My misfortune is that I live in the country' ") sum up events and activities of the same period not related to the "opera factory"; Jones gives ample attention to Haydn's business dealings with publishers and private purchasers not merely in Vienna, but also in Paris and London. This effectively prepares Jones's important thesis that Haydn's first trip to England was no leap into the unknown, since in London "he was, effectively, resident composer in absentia" (p. 126) as early as the mid-1780s—the following chapter ("London-Vienna-London") elaborates on this by painting a vivid picture of Haydn's extraordinary successes in the British capital. Jones also suggests that the composer was admitted in earnest into Viennese musical life only around 1797, when commissioned to set the text Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, and contrasts this late "local" acceptance with Haydn's increasing concern to write for an ever wider audience (in the chapter "Viennese Composer, European Composer"). The last chapter is headed by yet another famous Haydn quote, "Gone is all my strength," and describes the composer's final years after his giving up composing for good around 1803.

This solid structure, however, is pleasantly loosened by three "Images of Haydn" in the form of lengthier citations from important contemporary sources. The first of these, inserted between chapters 2 and 3, presents the full text of the composer's famous autobiographical draft from the year 1776. The second ably prepares the "London-Vienna-London" itinerary through a detailed portrait of Haydn from Charles Burney's 1789 A General History of Music. Finally, the third image, which in fact concludes The Life of Haydn, is painted by the composer's early biographer Georg August Griesinger, and fittingly confirms the relevance of such an enterprise by calling Haydn—as early as 1810—"founder of an epoch in musical culture" (p. 226).

The above outline of the book, nevertheless, tells little about the greatest merit of Jones's work, namely that it makes for a good read. The author does a wonderful job in introducing the "supporting characters" of Haydn's story: less-known figures like Georg Reutter or Nicola Porpora become old acquaintances after but a few sentences...